Love Lessons

Love really is a fundamental force of the cosmos, like gravity, like light. We are in It’s constant pull. There’s no earning, acquiring, or creating It. There’s simply removing the blocks and blinders to the direct experience of It.  Otherwise we rob ourselves of the true experience of participation with Nature, and deflect Nature's true expression through and with us.

 

This is, I think, or at least for me I’m finding, is actually a lot more simple, a lot more fundamental to the nature of things, a lot harder to grasp (because it's more of an 'allowing' than a 'grasping') than ‘giving love’ or ‘being a loving person’ or 'love languages' or 'labors of love' or all the overly personal or sentimentalized versions of love.

 

One piece of how this is showing up for me is through a practice I’ve been recently exploring from my psychic teacher Nancy. It's a meditation of being open to receive love and gratitude from all sorts of sources: the Earth, the waters, trees, animals, our ancestral lines, the celestial bodies. It's not unlike many of the animist practices I've been given over the last several years from my other teachers, but some of the language is having a particularly acute effect for me. Still animist influence/roots, from Nancy's time with the Sangoma tribe in South Africa (a deep bow to these lineages, and others preserving the memory and teachings of our original connectivity).

 

One of the practices begins with orienting to receiving love from the Mountains. The Mountains! I pictured Mt Tahoma, that ever present peak on our South Salish Sea horizon, and it was immediately like staring into the sun. I couldn’t do it. I had to look away, turn my energetic back to it, shut it all down.

 

When I tried again, I grounded deeper, and opened up just a teeny tiny little window to receive love from the Mountains through. What I noticed this time was hearing myself question: Why the f*ck should the mountains love or extend gratitude to me? The idea is pretty ludicrous, given the human track record.

 

The response that I got was: Because it is Our nature to Love.

It startled me into letting go for a moment and something was able to come through.

 

 

 

This is an echo to the first times I attempted grounding and receiving love from the Earth with my first Qigong teacher, Najeea. Especially as a white person, a descendant of colonizers, how could I possibly expect the earth to love me? Wouldn't that be just one more colonial extraction?

 

I am realizing (again) that, despite my long de-programming of Christian notions of ‘original sin’ and ‘works righteousness’, clearly I still have some unconscious driving beliefs around the nature of love and my own worthiness of receiving it. What the Mountains told me was that their love of me actually has much less to do with me and much more to do with them being themselves and in alignment with the nature of the cosmos. Is there any way to escape gravity while we live in a body? Is there any way to become less immersed in love that is fundamental to our reality, incarnate and beyond?

 

I have been doing a version of this practice every few days this month and I literally just sit and weep every time. I hope this doesn't come across as Pollyannish or overly simplistic during what I know is an incredibly hard time to be alive. But this is what's arising for me: there is no absence, no shortage of love. There are sometimes just things in the way from our direct experience of it. I know these are just words on a screen that and that I can't make more real for you or get you to 'believe' (I don't want that anyway). But maybe they offer a gentle knock on a long-locked interior door.

 

A few weeks into doing this practice, I was walking in the park near my house. There’s this little grove of brambly trees that makes a kind of shelter where folks sometimes camp out. As I was passing it, I heard a voice yell at me from the bushes: "You’re Beautiful!"

 

I laughed out loud. I said "Thanks!"

 

I think in years past I might have felt startled, off-put, or a little scared by anonymous attention like that (sometimes with good reason). But this was very pure and genuine, and I was surprised and pleased to notice I could actually take it in and just receive the gift. It felt like the Earth being like, listen lady, you’re kinda dense so we’re going to make this as explicit as possible: despite your best efforts at avoidance of this fact, it is just the nature of reality. You are loved.

 

I took this picture of myself shortly after that, wondering what the person actually saw. And to be clear, this is not me fishing for compliments or affirmation. I don’t consider myself someone lacking self esteem, and I generally do have a strong sense of self-love…I know I am loved, cognitively, but haven’t generally trusted, relied on or had a very strong felt sense of external sources of love (some of you will accurately read that as an attachment style thing).

 

Not assuming this is a conclusive or universal assessment on the topic, just my current take.

 

So to Nancy who opened up these iterations of lessons of love for me, thank you and bless you. May that I receive the gift.

 

And to the Mountains and all of Creation whose nature is Love, thank you and bless you. May that I receive the gift.

 

And to the person whose current ministry is hanging out in the brambles and yelling affirmations at strangers, thank you and bless you. May that I receive the gift.